The Rich Are Too Powerful

The trouble the very rich cause the rest of us is not so much what they have got, so much as that they use their money to shape change in their own interests. This can be direct intervention in democratic process through party donations. It can be through influence at many levels. It can be through their business decisions. It can be through ownership of media. It can be through distorting markets (think of London house prices).

The very rich tend to think that they deserve the wealth they control. Even where the wealth is a direct consequence of a valuable social or economic contribution this is rarely really the case. Rather there is a mix of luck and riding on the backs of other very rich people who have shaped the rule book to suit themselves.

The purpose of money in a modern economy is to enable the vast number of exchanges that contribute to our collective well being. If people don't have full and fair access to money it constrains their ability to contribute and to have access to the resources needed to contribute. In the end, the value of money is not a promise from a central bank, nor is it precious metal; it is the promise to contribute value through our collective efforts, such that future well being is assured.

In a complex economy the point where value is realised is frequently far away from where the value was created. We all know how the money in coffee is in roasting and retailing, not in growing and processing the beans in the mountains of Central America. In a globalized economy, the opportunity for the super rich is to control the points where value is realized and where possible to avoid the wealth captured being taxed for redistribution back to the people whose work created the wealth in the first place.

The consequence for the rest of us of this gross inequality is not only that we may be poorer than we might have been; it is that we have surrendered the power to improve what we do and how we do it. We constantly find our lives as workers and consumers being defined by the interests of a self serving finance system and massive corporations jostling to gain monopoly control.

We can only guess how things might be different if the very wealthy were not so actively advancing their own short term interests, but they deserve at the least the spotlight of concern that they are collectively guilty of massive crimes against humanity.

Forget Corbyn, the one to watch is Tom Watson

There is always a political narrative; the story in our political space that defines politics, ever shifting, ever changing, mesmerizing almost, by its constant movement told in the media of now, that defines the form, the feel and the function of the political space itself.

Through these media driven narratives there emerges a consensus about what should be included or excluded from political thought. This social space is supposed to be where we engage with the civic administration of power. Issues and ideas jostle for attention; to enter the narrative and perhaps become acted upon. The public response to the narrative is carefully monitored; the narrative adjusts to steer opinion, like some blocking move in the game of Go. Meanwhile there is an acceptance that in reality the decisions of government are, for the greater part, driven by narratives emanating directly from the practice of power that are, in telling ways, shrouded in a secrecy and complexity that partially conceals a brutal, self interested cynicism.

The internet's plethora of competing narratives, spanning all imagined explanations for our experience of being, can be used to create new narratives as millions of minds probe towards consensus using the stories they adopt and reject. This has emerged in an age of fear, where fear has been for so long a manipulated facet of the narrative to hold us from rebellion against our alienation from power.

The result in the UK is a change in our politics that is both exciting and alarming. Broadly people are being drawn into two competing groups. There are those who see the country under siege from migrants and pooled sovereignty agreements with other countries, who seek some reclaim of a world that probably never existed. In the opposite corner are those of the planet in crisis narrative.

This is the world of the populist politician; the champion of causes. This is the world of Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson. This is the world of Nigel Farage. This is where ambition breaks with convention to grab for power. The Machiavelli among them is Tom Watson.

What Are The Assumptions Behind Green Party Policies

Now That the Green Party is having its "surge" and posing a threat to the Lib Dems and Labour, opponents have started looking through the Green Party policies and rubbing their hands with glee. Policies that are anti nuclear, both for energy and weapons, the abolition of the Monarchy, de-criminalising drug use and for recognising some "terrorist" groups can all be presented as cranky. The overall aim to redirect economic policy away from GDP growth, can be presented as a policy to deliberately cause a recession, with all the meaning that has for people.

In responding to this the Green Party has some explaining and its not easy. Almost all Greens have been on something of a political awareness journey and it can be difficult to explain to someone who has not even started on that journey how the Greens got to where they are. What follows is my understanding and hopefully it will help both Greens and no non-Greens.

I don't think it is useful to think of population as being something that must be 'addressed', for that way lies the strange land of choosing who's life is less valid, but population is undeniably the big underlying issue. There are many people in their 90's who were alive in 1923 when the world population passed 2 billion. Now we are well passed 7 billion and no-one really knows where the upper limit will be,or what will cause it. Generally though, we see populations grow when food increases and disease decreases, but stabalise when people feel secure, have a quality of life and the means to control pregnancy.

We can see that this level of population, even with low environmental impact living, puts humans in extreme competition with many other species, to the extent that the ecosystems that have created a world we can so successfully inhabit, are in danger of not being able to function. We can also see that it causes many species to lose their habitat and become extinct.

The great achievement of humans, that has enabled this population surge, has not been the result of low environmental impact living. Quite the opposite, it has been the product of very high impact living. The whole world has been changed by human activity and the rate of change is growing day by day as more and more people benefit from the science/industrial lifestyle. The impact on local and global ecosystems is now one of the greatest threats to the lives of the billions of people alive now and expected to be born in the future. It is our major security risk.

The most strongly identified threat is from climate change caused by atmospheric C02 from burning fossil fuels as well as other 'greenhouse' gasses, including methane from the vast number of cattle people keep. Other key threats include deforestation, particularly of rain-forests and the pollution of the oceans and the destruction of marine life.

The human consequences of these existential threats are unlikely to be a single major catastrophe, but rather, as we already find, localised events that render places much less able to support existing populations. Most places where people live have populations with different identities and once life becomes dramatically more difficult, these groups are placed in competition with each other, giving rise to conflict. Such tensions are exasperated by poor administration and external pressures, including resource exploitation and geo-political power strategies. The problems we now see in parts of the Middle East and North Africa are likely to arise in other places with ever growing frequency. Rising sea levels will only add to the problem.

There are not just someone else's problem. The way the people in the more developed world lives is the cause. We find an ever growing pressure to accept refugees from both conflict and starvation. We can never be sure that the more stable temperate zones will remain stable, particularly if Arctic circle warming causes the release of tundra methane or the Gulf Stream slows. Furthermore, current agricultural practices and industrial production is dependent on mineral inputs, some of which are expected to become increasingly scarce, including rock phosphate and fossil fuels.

The major political question is how much should we respond to these threats. Many on the right hold that we are best not investing heavily in any response to the threats, but rather should invest in responding to the consequences. The Greens consider this to be criminal negligence of the worst order. Not only are the consequences of ignoring the threats not understood and could be more that we could hope to manage, but the very idea of deliberately letting millions starve and become embroiled in conflict is repulsive. It is like knowingly investing in extermination camps.

This then leads to trying to think out what the alternative political response should be. This is extremely difficult, because those countries that do have the wealth and resources to develop a meaningful response, where they adapt to a life within ecological constraints, are all heavily invested in a system based on capitalist driven economic growth, with minimal constraints. The failure of the Soviet style state capitalist command economies, excludes that model. The only remaining alternative is a mixed economy that includes a large emphasis on community and cooperative ownership, but again there are not good models to draw on.

This leads to a shift in thinking to look at the drivers behind wasteful consumerism. Here the differences in wealth and power in modern society look highly implicated. Although our industries are highly productive and use relatively few people, distribution depends on ability to pay. Thus many people are engaged in systems of not very useful work that distribute money. This appears to keep everyone focused on "earning a living", rather than responding to the powerless situation this system of production and distribution puts people in. Power, status and ease of living are all associated with higher incomes, thus keeping most people focused and motivated to work and consume. It is precisely this pattern of work and consumption that is responsible for much of the impacts of our way of life that the environment can't cope with.

Economists, including from the IMF, are increasingly concluding that inequality beyond a certain level harms capitalism, both because it deprives the middle class of capital and because it reduces consumption. This could be regarded as a good thing for the environment, but politically, as we increasingly can observe, it concentrates power in the hands of the very rich. If we accept this model we invite the tyranny of the oligarchs and commit ourselves to a modern feudalism in which we could no doubt expect to have to stand by powerless in the face of mass starvations and genocidal civil wars.

We need therefore to look at something quite different; a very high degree of equality of power and wealth, in which inequality is not driving excess consumption, but allows people not to feel threatened by sacrifices for the common good. This model has been developed in Scandinavia, where, and by no means fully, the environmental impact of people has been significantly reduced.

The United Kingdom is an old imperial power, whose last revolution predated industrialisation. As such it has vast amounts of structural inequality, perhaps most symbolised by its wealthy, powerful and landowning monarchy. The old aristocracy is still there, still owning vast amounts of land in both city and country, albeit alongside the new super rich and lesser oligarchs. The City of London has evolved from providing financial services to the Empire, to be one of the great international financial centres for United States dominated imperial Globalism. It operates a global network of offshore jurisdictions for secrecy and the avoidance of regulation and tax, that are frequently implicated in wealth and power extraction from vulnerable countries (increasingly including the UK). Many Greens, myself included, conclude that these forms of institutionalised inequality need to be removed.

Few would regard substance abuse as a good thing, but like it or not, recreational drugs are currently part of our culture. Their criminalisation results in vast amounts of petty and organised crime, for which a large police force is required for control. Not only is this a costly use of resources, but, together with crime driven by poverty and inequality, justifies the employment of a police force on the scale necessary to control the kind of dissent our current system would otherwise give rise to. It is therefore in the interests of a safer, more liberal and equal society that recreational drugs are decriminalised and carefully regulated, with education and health care used to mitigate the ill effects.

The development of the idea of a shared common good as a guiding social, political and economic principal has many implications. It suggests that the provision of services upon which we all depend, including water, energy, public transport, education and health are all services that belong in common ownership and should never become the private assets of any individual or class of people. The sacrifices that we each make to maintain and support these services are always for the common good and never to increase inequality of wealth or power.

How we understand our economy and society is always changing and will no doubt continue to do so. Over the centuries the nature of money has changed, from a means of settling debts with coins to numbers entered into computer terminals to create debts that can be traded for goods and services. We need to understand better the money system that we need to support a more equal society. It is unlikely to be the system of private banks creating money as debt that we have now. Similarly, we need to ensure that the way we distribute goods and services never deprives or humiliates those having difficulty accessing the money needed for basic living. The Green Party proposes a universal payment to provide everyone with the money needed for basic living. Again this supports the contract of all working for the common good.

One of the detrimental aspects of capitalist nation states is that they are highly resistant to changes that are not in the political or commercial interests of the state. This has repeatedly given rise to extreme state resistance to recognising the demands of minority and regional groups with specific sub-identities. Frequently this has resulted in the formation of "terrorist" groups and protracted separatist conflicts. Within Europe such conflicts account for most terrorist incidents. For any country, having such unresolved conflicts is not conducive to creating the kind of peaceful stability necessary for building a society and economy based on a shared understanding of the common good. It is therefore essential to work towards a politics in which these conflicts can be resolved without conflict and through dialogue and compromise. This may involve the development of a more fluid concept of nation and accepting some inconvenient differences in how people choose to live and be governed.

When we are looking at the kind of society and economy we need for a sustainable future, we should not assume that energy is the only issue and certainly not just be looking at greenhouse gas emissions.  We need to be looking at how we can develop an interesting and engaging way to live that causes the minimum of impact on ecosystems. This means being far more efficient with both energy and resources than we are currently, as well as avoiding creating pollution problems that will impact now or in the future. For this reason, Greens exclude the idea of using nuclear power, although even within the Green movement there are many who think non-uranium nuclear power should be considered while we are in transition away from fossil fuels.

The United Kingdom has been proud of its military history. It has indeed been "glorious" at times if you ignore the horror of drowning at sea, burning to death, bleeding in agony and the endless horrors and nightmares of those who have experienced war. Now, however, there is no such thing as containable conflict, if there ever was. As we consider ourselves as part of an interdependent planet, war becomes increasingly an anachronistic folly. The idea that the UK, or any other nation, thinks it needs to arm itself with the means to annihilate any major threatening nation is obscene. If such a war starts, we have all lost. If we are to live with nuclear weapons, the UK must do as most countries do: know they exist, know they always can exist and to oppose them and work constantly for the spirit of mutual trust where they will never be used. While no country should put itself in a position of total vulnerability to mighty tyranny, there is a need to ensure that no other country feels threatened by such defense.  NATO may have had a defensive purpose when it was established, but today it is an instrument of aggressive US policy in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. It is time for the UK to reconsider its defensive alliances in the interests of peace. We need the courage to be vulnerable.

While many might consider this vision for the United Kingdom a great loss. A loss of our national grandeur. A loss of our national myths. A loss of our story as the plucky buccaneer state that rules the seas, they need to consider the future this vision aspires to. It aspires to creating a space for "grown-ups". People who see clearly the situation they are in and who want to work intelligently to make the best of the situation. People who are willing to put aside childish illusions of all being millionaires, or swash buckling soldiers or great imperious bosses and who are willing and able to get on with the daily business of working respectfully and generously with each other.  This would not be a world where dreams of being "famous" or winning the lottery are the best compensation for being poor and powerless. Rather this would be a world where life is possible, broadly agreeable and as interesting as people's own creativity allows. For me, this is a far more attractive prospect than the hopelessness of staring at the daily dribble of news from around the world, telling stories of the horrors in people's lives and knowing that my country and how I live are part of the cause. We may not avert the cycles of disaster, but to not even seriously try because we would rather cling to what we have is pathetic. We can be better than that, for the common good.